The Gone-Away World

July 28, 2008 — NH

It takes a little while, because there is something entertaining in almost every paragraph of The Gone-Away World, but sooner or later you start to wonder when (or even if) you’re going to get back to where you started. The first chapter of Nick Harkaway’s first novel introduces an unusually fluid post-apocalyptic landscape and a bunch of trucker-repairmen who get charged with saving the world; the fact that in no sense is this introduction economical is insufficient preparation for the hundreds of pages of laconic flashback that follow, in which we skip back to the narrator’s school days and read about the development of his friendship with one Gonzo Lubitsch (more of him later), his early romantic fumblings and martial arts lessons, his eventual transition to an Oxbridge-esque university, his falling-in with a group of political activists, his arrest and incarceration for suspected terrorism, his difficult subsequent job-hunt, the details of the job he eventually finds with a top secret weapons R&D outfit, his tour of duty in an Afghanistan-esque clusterfuck of a conflict in a made-up Middle East country including a stint as stretcherman, injury and subsequent convalescence, and …. well, you get the idea. There’s an awful lot of Stuff in this novel. Some of it is told with deadly intensity, but most of it is told with a great and convincing enthusiasm — Harkaway’s narrator can gab like Iain M Banks on a roll — that is easy to wallow in. It’s not so much the clomping foot of nerdism as the dance-dance revolution; but, still, you do wonder when you might get back to where you started.

None of which is to say The Gone-Away World is a bad book. I think it’s probably a very good one, as it happens; but I also think that opening chapter is a mis-step, because it creates an expectation that the next two hundred pages go almost out of their way to refute. Harkaway’s love of meandering, tangential narrative is apparently almost Stephensonian in its excess, and in the midst of it you can end up drumming your fingers: the digressions and set-pieces can stop being enjoyable for their own sake. Which is a shame, because while some of the time it all adds up to a numbing excess of detail — when the narrator receives a note, for example, we’re told the handwriting style, the meaning of the style, the colour of the ink, the type of pen, and the type of paper; and at one point we get a loving description of every pothole in the driveway of his house — most of the time Harkaway directs his plot with a swagger, not to mention dollops of wry humour. The two-page exploration of the fate of sheep caught in a warzone, for instance, or the scene in which the narrator ends up stranded in a strip joint with a troupe of mimes, which turns out to be a lot less superfluous than it initially seems. From a distance, it seems obvious that the conviction, if not coherence, with which the narrative sweeps from a world more or less like our own (with a few notable but usually irrelevant-to-the-plot differences: Cuba has joined the UK, for instance) to one that is richly unfamiliar is one of The Gone-Away World‘s greatest strengths. It’s a novel that believes absolutely in whatever it’s telling you at any given moment. But the memory of that first chapter, and the promised future, means you can’t always enjoy that sweep as you’re reading.

Because the desire to get back to that opening world — to get some answers — is pretty intense. What you can piece together from the opening twenty-eight pages goes a little something like this: at some point, the Go-Away War changed the planet, erasing much of what went before — people, institutions, geography — and leaving only a Liveable Zone surrounded by an Unreal World. The Zone is maintained by something called the Jorgmund Pipe, Jorgmund being a gigacorporation that’s risen up to carve something like sanity out of something like a nightmare; and the Pipe sprays something called FOX into the air, which keeps away the bad things. The narrator, and the menagerie with whom he hangs out in the Nameless Bar — Jim Hepsobah, Egon Schlender, Annie the Ox, Sally Culpepper, Tobemory Trent, Gonzo Lubitsch (him again), Samuel P, and Roy Roam (I still can’t quite decide whether Harkaway’s way with names is evidence of genius or insanity) — are the Haulage and Hazmat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County (“ten trucks of bad hair, denim, and spurs”, 10), and when the Pipe catches on fire, they’re the ones that Jorgmund recruits to get it fixed. After disquisitions on types of bureaucrat (the ultimate of which would be “a person so entirely consumed by the mechanism in which he or she is employed that they had ceased to exist as a separte entity”, 15-6) and the workings of corporations (in the form of a parable about Alfred Montrose Fingermuffin, factory-owner), and negotiation strategies (“an ellipsis is a haymaker punch you throw with your mouth”, 16), the Company suit up and roll out, heading for the fire on a route which takes them through some distinctly creepy places. Harkaway has a habit of describing everything as seen through a sort of Spinal Tap everything-up-to-eleven lens — part of the enthusiasm I mentioned before — so a chair is monstrously comfortable, a plan includes magnificent redundancy, an individual is full of majestic self-importance. He gets away with it because he’s got a world to show us that we really haven’t seen before; the closest contemporary comparison I can think of is with the Stuff-filled “high-interaction” sidebar universes in Justina Robson’s clear-sighted negotiation of romance, Living Next-Door to the God of Love (2005). Like that, but writ large.

While we wait for that world to reappear, what gradually becomes apparent is that the sundering of this world we (almost) know is a specifically twenty-first century kind of apocalypse. The Go-Away war — a ferocious hundred pages of which takes up the heart of the book — isn’t the sort of thing that can be reduced to an easy allegory, but it’s clearly figured as a sort of millennial transition between then and now, old and new. It’s the preparations for war that bring the sf back into the story after over a hundred pages of youth and young manhood, when the narrator is recruited into a research division working on a new superweapon, one that will make enemies simply Go Away. His boss Professor Derek (a not-un-Q-like role) describes the principle this way: “Information, then, does matter — in the sense that it is the organizing principle without which matter simply cannot exist. Without matter, there is no universe and there’s no place to do anything. WIthout information, matter withers away. Vanishes. And gradually, even the memory fades. It won’t dissipate entirely, of course. But it becomes … slippery” (147). It’s a speech that gets at the heart of the novel: the tension between order and chaos — or organization and autonomy.

Harkaway’s evident interest in the world he’s creating is a joy, but it’s working through this theme that really brings out the best in him as writer. Not that the depiction of teen emotions and student philosophising and so forth is ever less than satisfactory, but the chapter in which the bombs are deployed en masse, as part of a stupid, wasteful escalation from a small-scale but politically useful conflict, is little short of terrifying: how lethal the absence of information, of certainty. Shadows become traps, places where the unreality is most concentrated and most horrible: “The attack is here, and there are people dying, but there’s no enemy, just darkness, confusion, and people getting dead. It’s as if this was weather” (216), with bullets “drifting on the wind like pollen” (218). It is, the narrator later realises, “the grimy rag and bone subconscious of our race” (272), come home to roost.

Standing tall amidst the chaos is Gonzo Lubitsch, big damn hero. (I said I’d get back to him eventually.) Back in the first chapter, the relationship between Gonzo and our narrator was sketched out in asides: “When the phone did ring (any time now), we could go and be heroes and save the world, which was Gonzo’s favourite thing, and perforce something I did from time to time as well” (7). He is not the leader of the Freebooters — that’s Sally Culpepper — but he is charismatic, confident, extremely dangerous, and probably wouldn’t recognise irony if it hit him with a plank. He is capital-H-Heroic, and the narrator is his shadow, his confidant, his wingman. Surprisingly little time is dedicated to establishing this relationship, but the fact of it is always there and frequently asserted; even Gonzo’s absence defines the narrator’s presence, with all actions measured against an impossible standard of What Would Gonzo Do? The biggest implications of this relationship for the narrator don’t become clear until quite a long way into the book, but from early on it serves as evidence that as much as the Go-Away War strips order from the world, the characters in The Gone-Away World need order to understand their souls: in just about every case, who they are is defined by what they do, from the “pencilnecks” who sacrifice their individuality to the corporate beast, to the soldiers for whom sublimation into a military hierarchy can be a form of salvation, to the “new” entities created after the war who simply want to live. The struggle at the heart of The Gone-Away World is the struggle against disorder, but it’s against personal apocalypse as much as global; the link between the two is emphatically undermined by a late-ish plot development that also confirms Harkaway’s commitment to the sfnal elments of his book. Unfortunately for those characters who get well and truly fucked along the way, it’s well-known, as one character puts it, that “the second law of thermodynamics … does not look kindly on unfucking” (383).

Of course, the narrator manages to find a way to live, and indeed at the end of the novel he’s alive in ways he didn’t realise he wasn’t at the start — not to mention perhaps the real hero. You could say that he survives the system, though I doubt The Gone-Away World would want me to paraphrase its conclusion in such po-faced terms: this is a book in which quite a lot is resolved by fighting, culminating in a triumphantly over-the-top, if somewhat boy’s-own, action sequence (during which Harkaway nevertheless finds time for his narrator to speculate on whether squid can watch TV). More than once in the book’s final chapters, you might recall the narrator’s loving description of kung fu movies from his youth — “The martial arts film is a curiously sentimental thing, fraught with high promises and melodrama … The plots are moral, Shakespearean, and have a tendency to charge off in some unexpected direction for twenty minutes before returning to the main drama as if nothing has happened” (44) — and, given its accuracy as a description of The Gone-Away World, wonder exactly how successfully the novel itself has resisted the call of comfortable, orderly formula. Resist it does — with those digressions and their (in Harkawayan terms) often monumental hilarity it’s a book constantly straining against its own coherence — but its ultimate completeness somehow suggests that The Gone-Away World might die in the memory as completely as it lives in the moment. The saving grace may be the ending, which stubbornly refuses to settle for getting the book back to where it started, and instead insists on escape into who-knows-what. “From here,” the narrator says, at the end, “it’s all about forwards” (531). So speaks a native of his country.

Like this:

Related

19 Responses to “The Gone-Away World”

It’s interesting that you mention the urge to return to that first paragraph’s world because I get the impression it’s a bit marmitey. I know James Bloomer said that he really struggled with the first paragraph, only getting into the book once he’d got over that hump.

It’s also interesting that you mention the university being Oxbridge-like as I think he really struggles to write about America. I spent whole swathes of the book unsure as to whether he was writing about America, the UK or some fictional third state. In the language (in particular the use of ‘Arse’ rather than ‘Ass’) and the characterisation (The military had a very British seeming Sergent major and they actually had ‘boffins’) feel incredibly British to the point where I don’t think this could have been written by an American.

In a way I think it’s a far more British book than anything that has come out of say Scottish SF as even Ken MacLeod’s endless pub scenes could easily have been written by an American.

Originally I was sure that I hated the first chapter and thought that the story would be better without it. Now I’m not so sure. What it did do was make me want to get back to that world, like you mention. Which was a bad thing, because it takes ages and that’s not really the point (well, sort of). Once I relaxed and realised it was a long and winding journey (in more than one way) I began to enjoy it more and more. Until I was living inside the story. But without the first chapter I’m not sure I’d have had that revelation and enjoyed it so much.

I’d imagined the university being in the UK, then got confused, then imagined my own Mid-Atlantic country. There was a lot of confusion, generally, which I came to enjoy.

In a way I think it’s a far more British book than anything that has come out of say Scottish SF

I think you could certainly argue that, yes; a specifically public-school strand of Britishness, probably. Some reviews have mentioned Douglas Adams as a comparison, which I can sort of see if I squint, but I felt Harkaway was taking his world much more seriously, even if he was being funny about it. The humour in the book in general interests me, because there isn’t a lot of prose fiction that I find funny; and yet here there was something about the way the gags were built into the narrative that kept me smiling.

James:

Once I relaxed and realised it was a long and winding journey (in more than one way) I began to enjoy it more and more.

Yes, I think that sense of relaxation into the story, wherever it may go, is one of the things the book does particularly well. As I said over on your blog, I like your Brownian motion metaphor for the narrative. I suppose I can see the point of the first chapter — it’s a hook, basically — but I don’t think the book would have suffered overmuch from a cold start, and to a certain extent I regret that I wasn’t fully blindsided by the Go-Away war. Imagine starting to read what seems to be a slightly odd comic coming-of-age novel and then being hit by that …

Hmm… I’m not sure about the Douglas Adams comparison. I always felt that there was an archness to Adams that I don’t think is present at all in Harkaway. I don’t think that The Gone Away World is written “for laughs”. Interestingly, I picked out a load of the jokes as I was reading through it because I wanted to refer to them in my review but upon re-examination of the annotated bits, I couldn’t find the funny parts. So, as you say, I think they are built into the plot and that to the extent where they can’t then be separated from that context afterward. They’re “You had to be there” gags.

As for the public school thing, I can kind of see what you mean. For example, the fact that teachers loom far more largely in kids’ lives than parents. Also the fact that both Gonzo and his shadow are “good all rounders” who go to universities that are much like their schools, and then just wind up in the army for want of anything better to do.

Having attended neither a public school, nor Oxbridge I shall defer to your greater expertise in both of these matters ;-)

They are nebulous concepts even to those of us who live here. In fact, up until the 60s you could comfortably talk about “England” as a synonym for “Britain” without anyone blinking. It’s only really in the face of Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism that the terms have become separated.

I’d argue that the most obvious exemplar of traditional Englishness are Tolkien’s hobbits : rural, petit bourgeois and relentlessly middle-brow.

[…] Niall Harrison demonstrates why I should only ever write about science fiction in broad, general terms (as I’m about to do over the summer – more on this later in the week) and leave the details to others. Harrison’s grasp of the purpose of Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World communicates almost (sorry Niall) perfectly the tone and sweep of the story told. The detail I think he misses, for my money at least, is the degree to which Harkaway’s novel is actually televisual in structure. The opening section, establishing the scenario of the Gone-Away War and the aftermath the world finds itself in, reads as the opening episodes of a TV series, and what follows – the digressions, the meandering and joyous romp through the pre-history of the post-apocalypse, is Lost or Galactica as conceived by Tarantino for commercial broadcast. […]

[…] plotted, but it was the most exuberant, enthralling, joyous novel I read this year. Niall said the “meandering, tangential narrative is apparently almost Stephensonian in its excess”, and I loved nearly every wandering digression it takes. Some chapters are more engrossing than […]

[…] Song of Time by Ian R MacLeod [review] Flood by Stephen Baxter [discussion] Lavinia by Ursula K Le Guin Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell [review] The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway [review] […]

[…] indeed; and I’d have welcomed the energy of something like The Knife of Never Letting Go or The Gone-Away World, or a more adventurous definition of science fiction represented by, yes, something like Swiftly, […]